He never enjoyed the cinematic cachet of Jesse James or Billy the Kid but Mexican bandit Joaquin Murrieta (1829-1853) was the subject of more than a few Hollywood westerns. The solidly Anglo-Saxon Richard Dix had played Murrieta in Paramount's The Gay Defender (1927) while matinee cowboy hero Buck Jones had traded his ten-gallon Stetson for a sombrero in Columbia's The Avenger (1931), in later years, the role would go to Bill Elliott in Columbia's Vengeance of the West (1942) and Jeffrey Hunter in the US-Spanish coproduction Murieta (1965). For MGM's Robin Hood of El Dorado (1935), the studio made an earnest attempt to cast a Latin actor. Leo Carrillo was first announced as the star of Metro's adaptation of the 1932 biography by Walter Noble Brown, with Raoul Walsh slated to direct, but the project fell ultimately to William A. Wellman. Wellman workshopped the script with a fleet of writers, among them actor Joseph Calleia. Born in Malta as Giuseppe Maria Spurrin-Calleja and a reliable Hollywood ethnic, Calleia was attached briefly to Robin Hood of El Dorado but then replaced when the studio brass deemed him too mature to play someone who had died at age 26. In true Hollywood fashion, Metro's final choice, Warner Baxter, was six years older than Calleia. Making uncredited contributions to the film's script was 25 year-old industry newcomer Robert Carson, who followed Wellman to Selznick International, where they shaped their original script for It Happened in Hollywood (rejected at Metro by Louis B. Mayer) into the Academy Award-winning A Star is Born (1937).

By Richard Harland Smith